Cheap wine built family Despite being described by a panel of wine buffs as Moncler marine Womens jackets Zip dark blue excellent lighter fluid , jerseys Casella Wines Yellow Tail brand transformed a small family business into one of Australia s largest wine companies in less than a decade. Wine dynasty. extortion victim John Casella, front left, and his father, Filippo, at a family gathering near Griffith. Their business produces Yellow Tail wine. Photo: Anthony Johnson In a prison cell in Junee, stricken by cancer and heart disease, is a criminal who sought to obtain cash by making an explosive claim: the Casella Wines fortune was founded on murder and drugs. Matteo De Dominicis Moncler down jackets button Men grey black has menaced the Casella family, which makes the hugely successful Yellow Tail brand, with this story for years. Three times they have paid him to leave them alone. In all $645,000 was deposited into his account. He wanted $5 million more. They had had enough and went to police. The Casella family are the victims not only of this brazen extortion attempt, but also the hurt occasioned by the attack on the late Filippo Casella s reputation as a key leader of the Australian wine industry, Casella Wines said in a statement yesterday, after the Herald left a message on the mobile phone of the company s managing director, John Casella. John is saddened that Filippo a loving husband, father and grandfather has been made the subject of such unfounded and untrue allegations made by Mr De Dominicis. This week De Dominicis pleaded guilty to two counts of blackmail, and there Moncler Kids girl down coats with hood zip blue is nothing to suggest any substance to his claims. But they have followed and troubled the family since 2008. At the centre of his extortion is the claim that he gave the family s patriarch, Filippo Casella, two kilograms of marijuana seeds for a plantation to be grown in Griffith in 1988. This was before Yellow Tail became one of Australia s most exported wines. The two had been friends from their days as itinerant workers in Queensland. At the time, police say, a crop grown from the seeds would have been worth more than $10 million. And so began the extortion. moncler baby Let me tell you the truth about how the Casella family became millionaires, De Dominicis wrote on one flyer which he threatened to post around Griffith, as revealed in the prosecution file. Above it were the pictures of four men: Gaetano Greco, Venera Greco, Nunzio Greco and Salvatore Greco. These four people are already dead, De Dominicis had written in Italian. I should be the fifth. In a conversation recorded by John Casella, De Dominicis claims the family killed his brother in law. They killed him, he said. They killed Nunzio Greco. In another flyer, also tendered to Griffith District Court during De Dominicis s trial for blackmail this week, he claimed Filippo did not earn the military medals he wore before his death last year aged 88 master of a fortune that was by then worth $665 million. Instead, De Dominicis alleged, they were bought for him by his son, John. John Casella reminds the community both within his home town of Griffith, and wider Australia, that Filippo Casella had no criminal moncler nantes coat record and had never participated in any activity as alleged by Mr De Dominicis, the company said in its statement. These allegations have been made by a man who has a prior criminal record and who has this week pleaded guilty to two serious charges. On Wednesday De Dominicis pleaded guilty to two counts of using menaces to obtain financial gain. For the family, it came as an enormous relief. "This matter has caused my family a great deal of stress, John Casella told the Griffith paper, The Area News, and today s plea brings us one step closer to being able to put it all behind us." In Griffith, the story is playing out to a dry Calabrian laugh track. You d have to be a halfwit, one of the town s elders said, to let this one shock you. From another, an old joke about Griffith s reputation: I tell people I live near Wagga. The irony of De Dominicis s arrest is almost beyond scripting, except it was scripted by police. John Casella would meet De Dominicis on a bench in leafy Banna Avenue, Griffith s main street. He would have a cheque for $1 million. On cue, De Dominicis threatened to kill Mr Casella. I want what s mine, he said. You would pay millions and millions of dollars not to have that publicity. Then the police arrested him, under the 2.6 metre statue of Don Mackay, built to honour the man whose death sparked the Woodward royal commission into marijuana trafficking in Griffith. Mr Casella said he paid the bribes moncler shops to protect his family. They were, Casella Wines said in its statement yesterday, paid out of fear of physical violence following a series of threats made against him and his family . There have always been rumours about the Casellas in Griffith: bags of money buried in vineyards, some of them still there; tins full of cash that never saw the bank; capital the family had but no one could explain. It may be that those same rumours that left them vulnerable to De Dominicis. But the family s incredible success has been no secret. Filippo was the Sicilian migrant who bought a swathe of land with his wife, Maria, Moncler Women goose coats chanvre Butterfly Collar Dark gray in Yenda in 1965. For a while they sold grapes to other wineries. In photo albums, they are seen working together in the fields him a handsome man with strong features, her a solid and hard working woman. By 1969 they were producing their own wine. Then Filippo s son became involved in the business. New crushers were installed, with a capacity of 200,000 tonnes. The wine started to sell to America. And sell. John Casella installed five new presses. The winery started producing 30,000 bottles an hour. There s been a decade of amazing growth the Herald s wine critic, Huon Hooke, said. If they weren t there moncler jeans there would be a huge effect on industry, especially the Riverina. They ve been mopping up excess supply for some time now. In the first few years of this decade people were saying, Thank God for Yellow Tail. In 2005 the then trade minister, Mark Vaile, inducted Casella Wines into the Australian Export Awards Hall of Fame. Its growth in America had been exponential. Yellow Tail wine is now the most imported wine to America. About 15 per cent of all wine that leaves Australia is made by the Casellas. Their products are exported to more than 40 countries

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